Antibiotic Overuse Could Lead to Public Health Crisis

01/31/2014 14:17
● Published by Sandy Kauten

Eighty percent of all antibiotics currently used in the United States are
given to farmed animals, according to the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration (FDA)‘s annual National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring
System (NARMS) Retail Meat report, released in February. At a record-high total
of 29.9 million pounds of drugs, the amount of antibiotics sold
over-the-counter at feed lot stores to American beef, pork and poultry
producers in 2011 was almost four times the amount sold to treat people.

“We are standing on the brink of a public health catastrophe,” said
Congresswoman Louise Slaughter (D-NY), author of the Preservation of
Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act. “The threat of antibiotic resistant
disease is real, it is growing and those most at risk are our seniors and
children.”

The latest NARMS data also revealed a startling 78% of salmonella found in
turkey is resistant to at least one antibiotic, as is 75% of salmonella in
chicken. Tetracycline-resistant campylobacter bacteria was also found in 95% of
retail chicken.

“For ground turkey, [the FDA] found 10 different strains of salmonella, resistant
to six or more antibiotic classes,” said
Gail Hansen, senior officer for the Pew Campaign on Human Health and
Industrial Farming. “We don’t have hundreds of antibiotic classes to choose
from. If you get salmonella and your doctor wants to give you an antibiotic,
they’re going to have to be careful in what they choose.”

According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, the FDA
has known that administering healthy livestock with antibiotics encourages
the growth of drug-resistant superbugs since the 1970s, yet over 30 years
later, the organization has yet to take any effective steps toward regulating
the practice. Opposition and warnings over antibiotic resistance have poured in
over the years from prestigious groups like the American Medical Association,
the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Infectious Diseases Society of
America (IDSA). In 2004, IDSA released the
report “Bad Bugs, No Drugs: As the Antibiotic Discovery Stagnates a Public
Health Crisis Brews,” warning that 70% of Americans who acquire a bacterial
infection were already resistant to at least one drug and “the trends toward
increasing numbers of infection and increasing drug resistance show no sign of
abating.”

“In the face of the antibiotic resistance crisis, we cannot afford to be
standing still. We need strong action to combat the overuse of antibiotics in
animal agriculture,” said
Steven Roach, Public Health Program Director at Food Animal Concerns Trust
and a member of Keep Antibiotics Working, a coalition of organizations
dedicated to reducing the overuse of antibiotics in food producing animals.
“The FDA needs to use all the tools it has available to begin rolling back this
massive use of antibiotics.”